At times you have to fight. No way around it. At some point, every one of us is confronted with danger or injustice. How we choose to combat that challenge is often life-defining. You can face difficulties head-on, or run from them, or ignore them until they consume you. But no one escapes conflict. No one.

After having national success on a syndicated program called Inside Edition, I went back to school. And not just any school: At the age of forty-six, I earned a master's degree in public administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. It was while studying in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that I worked up the game plan for The O'Reilly Factor. The rest, to use a cliché, is history.

The Factor concept is very simple: Watch all of those in power, including and especially the media, so they don't injure or exploit the folks, everyday Americans. Never before in the United States had a television news guy dared to criticize other journalists on a regular basis. The late Peter Jennings, a friend, told me I was crazy to do it. "These people will not allow anyone to scrutinize them," he said. "They will come after you with a vengeance."

And so they have.